Intended to discourage classroom reading teachers from relying on "phonics instruction" as a remedy for students' inadequate reading performance, this pamphlet presents reasons why phonics drills should not be taught at all in the classroom and offers a set of practical phonic awareness activities to help poor readers overcome reading difficulties. The pamphlet notes phonics deals with sounds rather than meaning, and that many words cannot be sounded out unless the meaning is known. It then presents seven exercises that illustrate how meaning is made during the reading process and how "sounding out letters" interferes with the meaning-making process. It then provides strategies that will enable children to use the more natural syntactic and semantic cueing systems that, in turn, will allow the grapho-phonic cueing system to fall into place. References are attached. (NKA)